Quirky Things My Dad Reads

Posted by Tracy Nesdoly
June 12, 2017

Quirky Things My Dad Reads

You know dads. They tell jokes that are so bad they’re funny – even President Obama, a very articulate man, has fallen prey to the Dad Joke. Dads willingly wear the weird hand-knit reindeer sweater during the holidays. They accept that sometimes socks are a good birthday present.

The father of a friend is similar to mine – fiction be damned, he loved nothing more than to read physics textbooks and articles about pure math.

This led me to investigate whether other dads had unusual reading habits. To be honest, I ran the survey around the water cooler, it was not a scientific study by any means, but it did turn up some interesting information. Here’s what I found out:

“I was in Los Angeles at Hollywood and Vine, at California Kitchen with my parents who had come down to see me when I was on a work trip. We were talking to a friend of mine, a producer for an entertainment show, and my dad asked her if she’d heard some story about a celebrity – I can’t remember who – and she was shocked, she’d only just heard the rumour herself. She asked him how he could possibly know about it and he said, “The Enquirer, and it always becomes true two weeks later.”

- Kobo PR Director Rene d’Entremont, speaking of his former life as a publicist.

“My dad reads the newspaper, all papers, faithfully cover to cover. The family joke is that he has read two books, Jaws and Xaviera Hollander, The Happy Hooker, which was allegedly found in his lunch box in 1980.”

“My dad was a politics/science junkie. He was a very progressive/socialist (like me -!) waaaaay before his time. He even belonged to an organization called The World Federalists which believed in a world government, and got their publication in the mail every month. He got lots of journals in the mail to our farm - Strategic Studies, Horizon, Scientific American and of course the UCC Old Boys magazine, Old Times (I would always read it, looking for cute guys.) He didn't care AT ALL about pop culture - I remember my mom laughing that he didn't even know who Elizabeth Taylor was.”

- Toronto-based designer and artist Kingi Carpenter

Recommendation for Dad:

A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn. Says the New York Times: “It’s her fidelity to the story and the ordinary people swept up in historical events — particularly victims of the “evil stupidity” of nations at war, the “lies and chicanery” of statecraft and the global propaganda machine — that make Gellhorn’s novel “A Stricken Field” (1940) essential reading for the political moment we’re living through today.”

So, the overwhelming evidence shows that despite the odd predilections for reading, there is probably an actual book for every dad. I’m going to offer my own father The Way Things Work Now by David Macaulay, just to see what happens.